Details

A lot of space on the left and right of each KickoffItem was wasted, so I've reduced the margins. This improves the readability of long application titles and descriptions. I've also changed the margin units from gritUnit to smallSpacing for KickoffItem and KickoffHighlight, which slightly reduced the margins of KickoffHighlight.

Please check whether there is subpixel placement of either the fonts or the selection rectangle with some other fonts (because gridUnit is being multiplied by a non-integer). I know it doesn't make sense but @flipwise and I have had to modify our patches too many times to count because of this.

I actually like the left margin because it contributes to visual hierarchy when headings are present:

As for long descriptions, how often would you say it occurs that you have one? From my experience, a lot of horizontal space is still just left empty in Kickoff with only minor exceptions(entries). Although I am guessing you raised the font sizes in your case so that's why the issues is a bit more prominent?

+1 conceptually. Since Kickoff has its own side margins, these additional margins in the items themselves are just unnecessary.

I tried to see how they would look with no margins and rather than simply filling the entire area where the item highlight is supposed to be, they extended past it. This doesn't seem like it should happen, which might indicate that something has been wrong in Kickoff for a long time, but I'm not sure why this is happening.

Another thing is the ratio between the left/right margins and the top/bottom margins varies with font size, so maybe Kickoff really does need some fixing up.

The height is units.smallSpacing * 2, plus the icon or title+subtile height, depending on which one is the highest. It should always be the needed height with a smallSpacing margin on both sides if that math is correct. This means that the fact that margins are needed to keep the icons an text within the highlight must be the cause of the inconsistency.

This makes Kickoff even a bit more more left-centered = looking like it's wasting horizontal space. That's why I prefer the way it was before, but I tested the patch and everything seems symmetric at least.

It seems that in the screenshots the "Small" font is set to be bigger than normal. With default font sizes Kickoff can end up looking like this (ignore the lack of few other patches):

That's a lot of unused horizontal space, while the benefits of reduced padding are only for apps with really long descriptions (which are minority) or for people using a bigger font size for "Small" text.

This makes Kickoff even a bit more more left-centered = looking like it's wasting horizontal space. That's why I prefer the way it was before, but I tested the patch and everything seems symmetric at least.

It seems that in the screenshots the "Small" font is set to be bigger than normal. With default font sizes Kickoff can end up looking like this (ignore the lack of few other patches):

That's a lot of unused horizontal space, while the benefits of reduced padding are only for apps with really long descriptions (which are minority) or for people using a bigger font size for "Small" text.

If everyone else is on board I won't object though.

It is wasting horizontal space, no matter how the margins are done, but at least with less side margin the horizontal space can be used for long descriptions. This is a problem with the overall design of Kickoff.

Regarding the small text size, I did forget to set it back to default when doing these screenshots.

I agree that this makes it feel more left-heavy. However I still think this patch is an improvement because the artificial margins we're getting rid of don't really solve that problem either. Instead they feel arbitrary, because they are.

Ultimately I think the only way to substantially improve this situation is to do T9042. But in the short term we could probably consider making the whole thing narrower, more like Kicker. Kickoff doesn't really benefit from the increased width in its current form.